NETH 2041: The Mind's Awakening
by WeaveTheStars
Summary: When Umbrella takes on an experiment centered on the Neurological Effects of the T-virus on Humans, (NETH), they get more than they bargained for. For Rain, Matt, Kap and the crew, that's a very, very good thing. (CH. 3 up)
1. Default Chapter

Security Breech 

The heartbeat continued its constant, lulling beat. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

**Viral Outbreak in lab 17: development.  
sealing...  
sealing...  
Failed. Security Breech.**

Thud-thud. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

**Shutting down climate control systems.  
sealing...  
sealing...  
Failed. Viral Contamination detected in Labs: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 4, 5A, 5B...**

Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

**Sealing Lab Sector.  
sealing...  
sealing...  
Unsuccessful. Viral Contamination detected in all residence sectors. Viral contamination detected in all technology sectors. Viral contamination detected in all system control centers.  
Containment to isolated sectors failed. Initiate extermination sequence.**

Something itched. Something wanted to be known, to be remembered. Something...something existed beyond the heartbeat. Slowly there came to be another thing, and another. Whoosh...hish.... A cold liquid lapping. Muscles and sinew straining to move. A pale finger twitched, brushing up against something hard and smooth.

**Releasing Elevator Brakes...  
Sealing airlock doors...  
Initiating sprinkler systems...**

And then slowly, slowly, awareness. _I_ and _my_ and _me_.

**Sealing airlocks in technology sectors...  
Initiating neurotoxin release...**

My fingers stretched, aching from too long without use. My neck tightened, and myhead turned.

**Collapsing work stations...  
Sealing doors...  
Releasing ceiling supports...**

I forced my eyes open, and suddenly came to full awareness of myself. I thrashed wildly in the liquid habitat that contained me, yanked wires making fiery pinpricks at their entrance points. I ceased my convulsions suddenly, lancing pain filling my skull.

Probes.

Of course I would be blocked somehow. It would have been too easy. The accidental link that existed between me and Red Queen's hard drive made it too dangerous for me not to be blocked. I let my mind wander through the uplink, treading cautiously through Red Queen's files.

What the...?

Water levels in the labs were up to four feet, and the labs only had an average ceiling height of eight feet. A few minutes longer and everyone in the labs would drown. I tried to shut down the sprinkler system--this sent another white-hot flare of pain through my skull. Damn probes.

The waters reached six feet. Six and a half. Seven feet. Seven and a half.

I tried, one last time, to unlock and unseal the lab-room doors, and was rewarded with another shock inside my head. I jerked involuntarily, the water sloshing around me.

The water in the labs rose the final half-foot, and I watched helplessly through Red Queen's heat-cameras as drowning bodies flailed and thrashed, then finally floated still. Their heat signals slowly dimmed out of sight.

**Scanning Heat sensors...  
Scanning...  
Consistent Temperature detected. Extermination Complete...**

Oh my God...

Every person in the Hive was dead.

And I was awake? That didn't make sense. I sifted through Red's files. I was supposed to be on 80 sedation, which would leave me barely conscious. According to the program monitoring my "habitat"--box full of water--I was only on 10 sedation, just enough to make me relaxed and maybe a little sleepy. I opened my eyes again, the water blurring my vision, and the box making it dark. By the narrow stream of light pouring through a small window by my feet, I surveyed my situation carefully. The probes kept me from moving too much in the process, but by and large, I got a good idea of what was what.

The hard plastic in my mouth and covering my nose was obviously a respirator; that was the whoosh, hish of which I had so recently become aware. Clear wires and tubes protruded from my wrists, neck, abdomen and thighs, and I was certain I had a few in my scalp as well. I felt like some kind of centipede. The effect was heightened by a strange, singe-piece wrap of some kind of stretchy white fabric, covering me from armpits to mid-shins. Quarter-sized holes down the sides, and one at the base of my ribcage, let the tubes and wires through to my skin.

Bit by bit, memories rose to my mind. White rooms...needles...probes and electrode patches covering my shaved scalp...

My shaved scalp...  
shaved...  
I shook my head slightly, a small enough movement to not incur too much punishment from the probes. Loose plumes of red-brown hair floated like seaweed at the edge of my view, and then I understood. The electrodes adjusting the sedatives had been slowly pulled free as my hair grew. The probes, too--slower, but they had moved enough by now, I guessed, that most of the probe protruded from my scalp. If I could just pull them out...but how? Umbrella policy ordered that probes be fail-safe, especially on stored experiments--which meant they emitted a huge dose of sedatives if they were disturbed too much. As loose as they were, one such dose wouldn't kill me--but my file said I had two probes. I sighed in frustration, my breath sending up a stream of bubbles which stirred the water around my head. At the edge of my vision a loose probe bounced. My lips quirked into a slight smile around the respirator. Quickly, so that it would be done before the pain could stop me, I clutched the single probe and pulled its last inch free from my skin.

In the moment before the sedative darkness dragged me under, Red Queen's last readout flashed red in my mind.

**All Systems Secure. Viral Contamination Contained. Entering Lockdown Mode.**


	2. My Past, Their End

I woke from my drugged sleep when something thumped heavily on the steel "habitat" ceiling, and the light from the window shivered, as if blocked by something moving in front of the window. I watched, afraid to think, breathing as steadily as I could.

I knew, as well as Red Queen did, what the T-virus could do. I checked Red's heat cameras, and almost squealed with joy. Heat! These people were alive! As to whether or not they were Umbrella scientists...I'd have to take my chances, because if they left without me I might never get out.

I took a long, deep breath, then braced my back against the long, body-formed backrest I was laid upon, and pounded my fists as hard as I could against the ceiling.

_Please hear me...please..._ I begged silently. The water was stirred into a frenzy around me. I kept pounding.

The sound of a body sliding off the box was the most wonderful thing I had heard since coming to this wretched place; or, it was until the horrible fear struck me. _Don't let them be leaving! Don't let them leave me!_

For a while it was silent. Frantically I stretched for the window, pressing my toes against the glass to prove I was human. _I'm not an enemy! I'm just a girl!_ I wished desperately that they could hear my thoughts. The irony ofthis was not lost on me.

Glass shattered at the top edge of the box, and I heard the sucking sound of a seal breaking, muffled by water and the wax earplugs protecting me from overexposure to the water. A sudden desperation to be out of the _box_ washed over me and made me flail at the ceiling-the lid, really-which was miraculously being shoved up and away by two pairs of arms. My desperation faded into apprehension as my frantic hands broke the surface of the water and were surrounded suddenly by air-cold, unfriendly air. I drew my hands suddenly back into the familiarity of the water. Carefully, carefully, I let one finger test the cold outside, then all of my fingertips, then one hand. Finally I reached my hands out of the water, my wire-and-tube-stuck arms reaching desperately for the dark haired man and woman who watched me from the other side of the meniscus.

Warm fingers wrapped around my arms at the wrist and elbow, between the protruding wires, and pulled me up into a sitting position. Sudden cold enveloped me, and I tossed my head to rid myself of the respirator, gulping the free air like a dying man.

"My god, she's just a kid!" the man growled, looking me over. I blinked my eyes frantically, trying to clear them after too long without use.

"Honey," the woman's low voice crooned in my ear, "I'm gonna try to take some of this shit off you, awright?" She was holding me upright with an arm behind my shoulders, a stripe of warmth across my back. I tried to make eye contact and nod, but I had begun to twitch convulsively and it was difficult. Painful spasms in my abdomen made me jerk involuntarily as the pair started plucking wires from me like stems from an over-ripe squash. Tiny fiery pricks heralded their progress. Wrists to elbows, elbows to shoulders, under the ribcage and at the base of the throat, sides of legs, ankles. One in the bottom of my foot. The water was tinted ever-so-slightly a dirty crimson when they finished.

"What were they doing to her?" the man demanded. I tried to answer, experimentation. What came out was a kind of strangled, ragged choking noise.

"Help me get her out."

I was lifted suddenly, fully into the cold air, and then set down on the concrete floor, which was even colder. Reflexively I drew my knees up to my chest, curling myself into a ball.

A warmth descended on my shoulders-a coat. I looked up and saw that the man was missing his, a black undershirt covering his chest instead. I tried to thank him, but instead I turned and threw up on the floor. Clear, bitter liquid spilled from my lips to the concrete. Of course, I thought wryly. Liquid nutrition only.

I tried to imagine how I must look to these two, my rescuers, and another man in a shirt and slacks that I now noticed was standing off to one side. Huddled on the floor, gasping and convulsing, soaked from heat to foot and wide-eyed in confused innocence and fear, like a newborn puppy. It must have been laughable. It didn't feel laughable.

I kept panting, not out of need but instead for the sheer delight of breathing real _air_, not the oxygen-enriched, artificially supplied crap that came through the respirator. Clean, cold air. I looked up, tears of joy sliding down my cheeks. Twenty-foot ceilings. Corridors stretched out on all sides. Just space. Beautiful, free space.

"Shh, you're alright," the man, whose coat I wore, said as he knelt beside me. He reached out to lay a hand on my head. I reflexively drew back the first time, but when he reached out his hand again I didn't move. His warm palm felt achingly familiar on my cold cheek. At his touch his name flashed through my mind- Joseph Demirez, but he was known as JD.

"Do you remember anything? Your name?" the woman asked softly. I tried to remember...but nothing came. My eyes fluttered involuntarily as I tried to find anything in Red's files on me. Not me as a test subject, or me as a project. Me personally. I gave him all I could come up with.

"NETH-2041"

My voice came out raspy and harsh, and I had to try three times in order to say even that, but I had spoken. That was something. JD gave me a strange look. I tried again.

"I d-don't rem-member my name," I said between painful abdominal convulsions. "B-but they called m-me NETH-2041. It stands f-for Neurological Ef-fects of the T-virus on H-humans, n-number twenty f-forty-one."

"What?" JD growled. He looked angry.

"I'm s-sorry," I whimpered. His eyes grew wide, and he said, "No, not you, not you. Were you..."

I nodded. An experiment.

The spasms were calming down. "Th-they were testing to see what the neurological effects w-would be if they injected a controlled strain of a v-virus they created into a human."

Rain and JD traded a look.

"These bastards just think they own everybody," the woman said in a voice that, while soft, held a wealth of danger. She whipped a piece of broken glass across the narrow hall between the boxes. It hit another box and tiny pebbles of jagged glass scattered across the floor. I jumped.

"What'd they do, kidnap you off the street?" the woman asked coldly. I shook my head, gradually recalling. They had taken away my past, once. But after they gave me the virus, even they couldn't stop my remembering. _Except my name...why can't I remember my name?_

"M-my father left my family to live in the Hive, to work here for Umbrella. When I found out he was leaving-though obviously not where he was going-I hid in his car. When he got out at the entrance, this gorgeous old mansion, I followed on foot. I had just gotten inside the actual structure of the Hive when they caught me. They were going to kill me, I think, but my father convinced them to put me in testing instead. I think he considered it a mercy." I laughed bitterly.

"I was twelve at the time. I spent _three years_ in a little white room full of one-way mirrors. The only outings I got were spent unconscious and being jabbed full of needles." A hand went subconsciously to the back of my head, where my skull met my neck. I knew there would be a hundred circles of needle-pricks, layered each on top of the others. My ankles and inner arms looked much the same.

"I used to love my hair," I added absently, twirling a re-grown strand between my fingers. "It was one of the few things I liked about myself. They shaved it off to stick my skull full of probes and cover my scalp with electrodes. And then, when I was fifteen, they decided they were done with me and stuck me in a fish tank in a room full of mutant bunny rabbits," I finished, my lip curling in disgust. I hated them. _Hated_ them!

"How long were you in there?"

I searched Red Queen's files on me, my eyes slipping out of focus as numbers and letters seemed to flash before me in rows of red on black.

"Three years," I answered, amazed. I was an adult, a legal adult now; I was eighteen. Yet I felt more like a child than ever before. A cold, frightened child.

"Holy shit," the woman exclaimed. "How can you even still move?'

"Side effect of the virus. Regeneration of dead cells. It would be pretty near impossible for my muscles to atrophy."

Amazed looks. I wanted to cry.

"Can you help me get out? I have a chance now, now that they're all dead. But I can't get out alone," I pleaded.

The woman's eyes sharpened, her dark gaze becoming suddenly intense.

"How did you know about-"

Unlocking from Secure Mode

Manual Unlock Procedure-not authorized

Initiate Emergency Weapons System

I screamed. The woman stopped talking, startled. They both stared.

"You aren't the only ones?" I cried, eyes wide with desperation. "Why didn't you tell me you weren't the only ones?"

Four warm bodies appeared in red in the booby-trapped hallway from the Central Entrance to the Queen's Chamber.

_Shut down weapons system._

_Shut down weapons system!_ I demanded desperately. A sudden stab of pain sent me sprawling on the cold concrete.

_What the...?_

"Inhibitors," I gasped, rolling over onto my back. The probes weren't enough for them? They had put inhibitors directly into my head!

In the trapped hallway, the first laser traveled slowly across the path at neck-level. Three of the red bodies hit the floor, alive. The fourth fell, too-in two pieces, slowly cooling and dimming from view.

My fingertips darted across my scalp, pressing tentatively here and there, feeling along the mesh of wires just under the skin that had been part of a poorly designed monitoring system. I found the irregularity almost immediately, a square bump that didn't fit the pattern of the rest.

"Hit this with your gun," I told the woman hurriedly, getting up on my knees and parting my sodden hair.

The second laser went out, ankle-level. Two warm bodies had gotten up-the third remained on the ground for some reason, and it was cruelly severed by the laser.

"Hit it!" I yelled again.

The first of the two remaining bodies tried to jump the laser-just as it moved upward, back into his path. The body fell in even halves, its warmth beginning to dissipate.

"You have to hit it! If you don't, they'll all die!"

The last living person cleverly avoided the high laser, throwing Red a bit of a loop. Up until now she had been following the pattern for energy conservation. On the next one, she would pull out all the stops.

I gave up on the woman, instead snatching her knife from her belt and sliding the sharp point under the little box on the meshing, ignoring the prick of pain. Levering with the knife, I pried the inhibitor free with the sharp noise of cracking solder. I sent the command to shut down weapons systems-

-just as the impassable web of lasers passed through the final body, reducing it to a heap of cauterized tissue and charred cloth.

I moaned and fell back against the box, my hands clenching in my hair.

"What?" The woman asked.

I began to cry, letting their questions melt into the quiet of _Dining Hall B_ unanswered, curled up on the cold floor of a fortress full of the dead.


	3. My Us

_Thanks for the kind reviews, everyone! And as to Xmaster's question...you'll have to read on and find out..._

I sat up again when the lights blinked off. A moment later the backup power came on, lighting the hall in a cold blue glow. Reflexively I flicked back to Red Queen, searching her for the cause of the power loss. _That's odd_, I thought. I was sure that was the only inhibitor. But I could only find complete blackness. It was as if Red wasn't even…  
_Oh my god.  
_They had shut down Red Queen? All the pieces clicked together. Why they were going to her Chamber, why she killed the four she trapped in the hallway. But that meant...that meant...  
_Kchink...kchink..._  
"I'm on it," the woman said, sheathing the knife she had taken back from me. She turned a corner as I watched, frozenin disbelief. It was too fast! They wouldn't have...  
"Hey JD, we got a survivor!" the woman's voice called from nearby. Then softer, "It's okay, we're here to help...you seem to be in some serious"  
"Rain, no!" I screamed, lurching forward to my hands and knees. I was too late.A snarl, and Rain yelled in surprise and pain.  
"Get offa me...get offa me! Get 'er off me, JD, before I stab her ass!" I hauled myself to my feet by the edge of a box, no easy task with the white wrap holding my ankles together. "Rain, JD, you have to kill her!" I yelled to them. "Shoot her!" I picked up a piece of glass and slashed off the stupid wrap at the knees and dashed a few holes around the new bottom so it would stretch. Then I straightened, tightening my fingers around the shard that poked painfully at my soft palms. I wanted a weapon, no matter how meager.  
I staggered into the cleared area where Rain and JD were standing, leaning on boxes along the way and trying to start walking on my own. Rain had her machine gun braced against her shoulder. In front of her, stooped and snarling, stood a female scientist with blood staining her bared teeth. I recognized her. Dr. Amy Diltoven, a bio-technician who had been working on a variation of a drug that would have cured Alzheimer's.  
They weren't all bad, I thought sadly as Rain's machine gun thundered and Amy was knocked across the floor into a heap of plastic piping. _Then again, they all knew the things the company did. They all knew about the human testing, and they did nothing!  
_"I told you to shoot her," I said angrily. "Yeah," she said, eyeing me suspiciously. "How'd you know my name?" I opened my mouth to answer, but then paused. There wasn't time for a real explanation. "Some things, you just know," I told her instead. Rain looked at me hard, studying me, then opened her mouth as if to speak.  
She was interrupted when three people appeared, a red-haired woman with a leather jacket over some kind of filmy red dress, and two men, one dressed like JD was and one in a grey-blue shirt and a pair of jeans. The man in uniform had a jacket like the one JD had loaned me, with white lettering that read, "Kaplan." Just underneath it was a familiar, red-and-white sigil, like an open umbrella.  
I looked down in horror at the jacket I wore, which bore the same sigil, and frantically shrugged it off my shoulders unto the floor. I took a step back in disgust. JD saw, but didn't ask why. He was intelligent, I thought. He understood that I would rather freeze.  
"Kaplan" spoke up, saying, "What was all the shooting?" "We found a survivor," Rain answered.  
"And you shot him?"  
"She was crazed," Rain said coldly, unrolling a bandage. "She bit me."  
"She bit you?" I cried, seizing her wrist. A drop of blood from her wound touched my finger, and I had the sudden urge to shriek and shake it off. Tainted blood.  
_No..._a voice in my mind mourned. _I didn't want her to die.  
_The thought should have seemed strange. After all, she had plenty of chance to survive. But it seemed strangely natural, and that frightened me. The only time things like that seemed so natural was when they were going to happen.  
"She's gone...she's gone!" JD breathed, kicking aside a piece of plastic piping.  
"That's bullshit." Rain finished wrapping her hand as she went to stand by JD's side. "She fell right here," he insisted, "But she's gone!"  
The red-curls woman spoke up next, and as her words filled my ears I found her name. Alice. She said, "Look at this. There's blood, but it's not much."  
The handcuffed man crouched to look at it. "Looks like it's coagulated," he said.  
_Matt. His nameis Matt.  
_Alice agreed, and Matt said disbelievingly, "It's not possible."  
"Why not?" JD demanded. Matt straightened and looked him square in the eye, a challenge. "Because blood doesn't do that 'til after you're dead."  
"Can we go now?"  
Spencer was the speaker, the blue-shirted man I had noticed before.  
"We're not going anywhere until the rest of the team get here," said Rain authoritatively. A long pause followed. Alice looked at Kaplan, Kaplan looked at Alice, Spence looked at both of them, and I looked at the floor.  
"There's no one else coming," Kaplan said softly. Rain's gaze snapped up and she said, "What the fuck are you talking about?"  
JD hushed her. "Wait. Quiet." The sullen rasp of steel on concrete rang behind me. I turned slowly, full of dread, even knowing already exactly what I would see. The man's face was half gone and oozing globs of congealed blood, a soaked lab coat clung to his peeling shoulders, and under his corneas were festering pockets of pus. Dead eyes.  
Murmurs of horror and disbelief sounded behind me, and a chorus of words arose that said nothing but steadied the mind in the saying. Stay back...I said stay back...they're behind us...they're everywhere...why aren't they dying? I heard them without hearing. One of the creatures stumbled toward me. I dropped my pathetic piece of glass and finally stood on my own feet, grabbing a metal pipe that rested on the ground. Reflexively I brought up the pipe as it lunged, and the thing's jaws closed around it, wide and drooling. It was a man, in a janitor's uniform.  
My stomach lurched. I wrenched the pipe a full 180 degrees around, snapping his neck in a rattle of cracks and pops.The man'sbody went limp and he slumped to the floor.  
I had wasted to much time on weakness.The only way out of the Hive, as far as I knew, was now blocked by a horde of human viruses. It sunk in as I swung the pipe like a bat at another creature's skull. I had thought all this...Red Queen going psycho, the T-virus getting out...was an opportunity. Now I realized it wasn't. It was a nightmare, and I was going to have to fight my way out, tooth and nail. The pipe connected and the woman-virus staggered backward. I wound up for another swing. _I refuse to give up without a fight._  
Behind me I heard something. Kaplan's voice. Numbers.  
"Zero four, zero three one, nine six five!" Kaplan finished, turning again to fire on the oncoming dead. For a fraction of a second an image shot across my mind, across my vision. JD's face, hands, neck, torn and bloody, his eyes marred by the white sores of a T-virus victim.  
"No! Don't open it!" I screamed, hurling myself toward him. My body crashed into his and he stumbled, but too late. The elevator door swung open, and what seemed a hundred hands wrapped around him, insisting, unshakably pulling him into the writhing mass of bodies. Bodies with teeth, and nails, and insatiable, inhuman hunger.  
Rain yelled desperately to JD, "Grab my hand, man! Come on!" "Don't let go!" JD begged. "Don't let go!" Rain didn't let go. She was bitten, and her fingers released of their own accord. "JD!" she yelled, desperately reaching for him. Heart wrenchingly, he called back to her. "Rain!" he begged. And once more, desperate. "RAIN!" he howled, before he disappeared foreverinto the mass of arms like vicious vines.  
Wordless screams of pain rang in my ears, but I blocked them out, and I wrapped an arm around Rain to pull her away. I was glad her clothes stood between my skin and hers. Already the searing grief and horror that I felt from her choked me. A phrase came, unbidden, and echoed and re-echoed in my mind. _The first of our number to die._ True, One, the Medic and the two young ones who I knew nothing of had fallen to Red's lasers, but I had never seen them, never seen their faces. JD had helped me. He gave me his jacket.  
_The first of our number to die. But not the last.  
_Sometimes those revelations would shock me or startle me. Sometimes I had to get it two or three times before I could believe it. This one did not startle me. I knew the first time that it was true. And in that, my heart was crushed.  
I staggered after the "Us" I had found myself bound to, in mourning in my own way.For Amy, as well as JD.


End file.
